Monday, December 05, 2016

It's the giving season and time for my SECOND beret auction of 2016. The previous one was for the Johnson County Democrats, but I'm sure a lot of my GOP and non-Democrat friends would love to be seen sporting this lovely head topper.

So this is a non-partisan charitable beret auction on behalf of the Johnson County employees' charity drive. Proceeds may go to either United Way or Iowa, at the choice of the winning bidder.

Official Deeth Blog Berets have raised $631 for charity the last couple years. Peter Byler had the winning (and record) bid last year at $211. We're starting out at 5 bucks this year, which is $3.01 more than I paid for it. The tag from the La Crosse, WI Goodwill is still attached proving that it is not only the kind you find in a second hand store, but was actually found in a second hand store.

Johnson County employees may bid here. Non-employees may contact me by any means necessary - email to johndeethiowacityATgmail.com, Twitter direct message, Turtle Express, Facebook message, Special D, or shortwave radio numbers station (they really exist and I've heard them). The deadline for bids is noon Tuesday, December 13. I'll keep the current leading bid prominently displayed on all my accounts.

The long-time coordinated campaign model that's under attack in a hundred Smart Takes WORKED in Johnson County. We
produced the numbers we always produce, the numbers that through 2012
were enough to meet the target for a statewide win. But in 2014 and again in 2016, while we held our own, the rest of the state slipped away.

If you're reading a state level political blog, you've already seen multiple takes and countless tweetstorms about The Democrats' Rural Problem.

One of the common complaints in those smart takes is the archetype of the
staffer kid from the east coast dropped into a small Iowa town and expected to organize with no local ties. But that works in Iowa City because everyone here is either from someplace else or used to dealing with people from
someplace else.

It's been 20 years since I lived, briefly, in a small town
and ran a losing race in a rural legislative district. I learned a lot,
and some of that knowledge still matters. But much of it is outdated enough that my knowledge is even more "outsider" than it was before.

I'm not convinced The Rural Problem is THE biggest problem nationally. I've seen, but can no longer remember to attribute, the argument that Hillary fell between the cracks. The Emerging Democratic Majority of non- White Straight Males that's been discussed for 15 years is growing, but not fast enough to overcome the Farm Belt-Rust Belt losses. This argument holds that we're on the right track and just need more time. But it assumes that the voting rights setbacks that almost certainly cost us Wisconsin and North Carolina won't get worse.

So maybe The Rural Problem isn't the biggest thing nationally, but it's the biggest problem here in Iowa. The bazillion dollar question is: How much of this is because of the decline of the non-coastal non-metropolitan economy? Yes, those things will be hard but they can be addressed. If that's the problem.

But how much of the Democratic problem with rural America is the cultural cluster: gender and race and immigration? How much is the abortion stuff and the gay stuff and the trans stuff and the gun stuff? Or, even worse, how much of it is European style ethno-nationalism?

After thinking long and hard my bet is more of the real Rural Problem is somewhere in there, rather than in the euphemistic excuse of the economy. I think it's somewhere on the less extreme edge of that cluster, in a generalized zone of fear and discomfort and confusion rather than as an emerging neo-fascism.

Assuming that's the real problem, it makes a solution harder. Democrats cannot turn our backs on the core of our own coalition to chase votes that we're currently losing. We can only work to win over hearts and minds and that's a long game.

And we have to do that with some issue realities that will make it harder for us.

One, the NRA's de facto position that mass
shootings are simply the price we pay for a "free" society is no longer tolerable. And there's not a way to make it harder
for people who shouldn't have guns to get guns without also making it
harder for law abiding people to get guns.

And two, climate change isn't solvable without major lifestyle changes. I suspect if pressed, many climate change "deniers" will admit to the
science but are uncomfortable and/or fearful of the lifestyle changes
that the solutions will require. It's basic physics: it takes energy to heat stuff, cool stuff and move stuff. (It's not just isolated small towns that need to deal with this; it's
long commute suburbs and refrigerated cities in the desert and tropics
too.) There are certain realities of the information age, climate change era
economy that are especially challenging for communities below a certain
size. And that calls into question the long term viability of some sparsely populated areas.

A couple more random thoughts on the road forward:

We can stop worrying about Big Wall Street buying our party, because
that money is gone forever. There will still be high-dollar donors, sure, but the financial industry is gone. We will of necessity be
shifting our finance model.

And the worst thing we can do now is re-fight the primary. I took the 2000 nomination fight hard and I spend about three years going through the room at events evaluating people in those terms: "Bradley, Gore, Gore, Bradley, Bradley, Gore Gore Gore." It was emotionally toxic - bad politics and bad for me personally.

So the WORST thing Dems can do now is evaluate everything in terms of "Bernie, Hillary, Hillary, Bernie, Bernie," or define that nebulous word "progressive" in those terms either. We don't have the political strength to waste any of our energy on an in-fight. I personally don't have the strength for it either.

Sunday, December 04, 2016

It seems every Democratic writer worth their bandwidth and every Iowa Democrat with an opinion has written their manifesto of What Went Wrong and Where Do We Go From Here. I've of course been considering the question, but have had little to say. In fact, this began as an intro to my attack on that issue, but has instead turned into a separate post, and yet another indication that my head still isn't in the game yet.

Instead,
I've retreated into the personal more that usual. The end of an election, any election, even one where I'm happy with the outcome, is a major life milestone for me. It's essentially the start of my New Year more than the late December/early January holidays are. I go through a big emotional crash bordering on depression as the excitement suddenly stops. (One New Year's Resolution is to write more openly about my mental health.) This cycle is even more of a milestone, as I've essentially been going non-stop since I started my serious caucus prep work in August 2015.

I
did a little theater in college and that's the only thing I can compare it to. You spend weeks and months building and planning and dress rehearsing a show, spending long hours with the same people. There's an absolute, The Show Must Go On deadline. It all ends with an extremely long day - the theater tradition is you strike the set immediately after the last performance - and a late night party. (Cast parties are WAY better than even the best victory parties.)

Then
it's over. The thing that was the central facet of your life for so long is gone. The people you practically lived with vanish and scatter. And even if the show was great or the election was won, that's depressing.

It's
even more depressing when the outcome is disappointing. I've gone through election cycles not only in my current role as an an election office staffer but also as a volunteer, a journalist, and a candidate. But I NEVER worked harder than the cycle I was a staffer. And that crash has got to be especially hard this time; not only the defeat, but the end of the job AND the loss of opportunities for the next job.

One
of my big mistakes that staffer cycle was that I didn't have a post-election plan, even to the extent of "finding my next job." It didn't help that nearly all my local candidates lost.

So
even though job hunting isn't necessary for me, I've tried to make a post-election plan since about 2004. I'm realizing now this would have been more useful to people BEFORE the election. But the writing muse is hitting me now, so I'll re-up it a couple weeks before the next election.

Some of these plans are better than others. In 2006 I got serious about my writing, and in 2012 I had a change in career direction with a new boss and an immediate mini-election season of three special elections in a row. Changes at Work are also part of this year's plan, as the new GOP Trifecta in Des Moines is likely to change election law significantly.

Other plans are
less plausible this year, like the Packers 2010 playoff run. Football victory eased the pain of election defeat. Though I'm still mad that Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Legislature, in addition to destroying a century of the Wisconsin Progressive Idea, also ruined the month that the Packers won the Super Bowl.

This year, I've done a
week long vacation, which was also part of the 2004 plan. There is a lot of time off coming up as we complete the final stages of election close-out. The government employee holidays cluster tightly from Veteran's Day through MLK, and I'll enjoy them while I can. The nature of public employment is likely to change dramatically in this state come January. The is much scuttlebutt about Trump sending Terry Branstad to China, but I'll bet the beret that he stays in Des Moines long enough to sign the repeal of the Chapter 20 collective bargaining law, the My Precious he's been seeking for almost 30 years.

The
snow held off long enough for me to clean out The Smallest Farm and yard. Even managed to harvest one last crop of beans and eggplants, since we didn't get a hard frost until about November 15. Picking hot-weather veggies in Iowa in November. Too bad climate change isn't real, huh.

I got a new tank for Shelley the turtle during the seven day workweeks of late October and set it up on that first Veterans Day three day weekend. Sometimes, rather than thinking about solving the unsolvable, it's just more rewarding for me to sit and watch her slow calm life. Bask in the sun lamp for hours - not sure who's lazier, her or the cat. Then go for a swim, with a combination of graceful gliding and floating and goofy awkward leg waving. As one on the autism spectrum I can definitely relate to hand flapping.

Also
this year I've developed a new obsession with a geek stereotype hobby, short wave radio. I got my first cheap radio last year, as part of my post-election plan for the city election. (That one was a very big win for me emotionally, but the crash happens anyway.) Then a couple weeks back I got lucky and found a high-end radio at a steal of a price at Goodwill Reboot, and I've stretched a long wire the whole length of my football field sized lot as an antenna.

Short wave has declined as a medium
in the internet era, as foreign services have shut down their broadcasts to North America. The only signals that are easy to pick up are religious broadcasters and Radio Havana.

Struggling to pick up an iffy signal from Cuba in my basement in the days after Castro's death has a deeply clandestine feel to it, like you're literally the underground resistance. So maybe it's an appropriate hobby and metaphor for the Dawn Of The Age Of Trump.

Maybe this feels like a cop-out. But like my turtle I'm moving at my own pace. Sometimes you stick your neck out, sometimes you hide in your shell. If you're reading this two years from now the politics and circumstances may be a bit different but you still should make your post-election plan.

The damage this election did won't be undone in my lifetime, and I'll be spending the immediate future on defense and the rest of my years playing the long game. For the long game, you need your strength. The What Went Wrong Manifesto is still in my head, but right now the Packers are about to kick off.

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

These are dark days. Yesterday people were literally Sieg Heiling Mein Trumpf.

But flipping the channels a saw a little hope - in my new favorite ad. Most times the shorter version is run; this is the full cut.

Searching for the clip I learned that the official name for the Amazon spot is "Old Friends," a priest and an imam, in a ecumenical friendship that's not uncommon for the clergy. They visit, the visit ends, and they both strain a little to stand up. As they part they both get the same idea and get each other kneepads, bright green neon kneepads, as a gift. Amazon delivers - this is, after all, an ad - they chuckle at their mutual insight, and they each go to their house of worship and pray, wearing their new kneepads.

Coming just days after a candidate who pledged to end Muslim immigration was elected president, this is a powerful statement delivered in a gentle tone.

But that's only secondary. Because the purpose of any advertising is primarily to sell your product. Amazon clearly believes, and has probably focus grouped and tested, that a positive portrayal of an Islamic faith leader will lead to you ordering more Stuff. Diversity is good for business.

And so is faith. This ad is a rare appeal across the current polarized cultural lines. The diversity angle for the left is easy, sure. But just as interesting is the positive portrayal of religious faith, which the right often complains is too rare in popular culture.

The central motivation driving the ad is prayer - the faith component and the physical component. And the distinct prayer image is important. I don't know my faith garb well so I wasn't 100% sure the imam was an imam. I wondered if he was some sort of Eastern rite Christian, still ecumenical but not AS ecumenical, until he prayed in the distinctive Islamic forehead to ground prayer style.

The purchases (this is an ad) are made because each clergyman recognizes that the other's aging knees make the physical part of prayer harder. The kneepads mean that the priest and the imam can pay less attention to their aging bodies and focus more on the Father Son and Holy Spirit or Allah, whatever you call God.

An ad may be a small thing to base hope on right now, but I'll take what I can get.

Saturday, November 12, 2016

It feels like an exercise in Don't Blame Us denial of the reality of Trump's America and Branstad's Trifecta to even take a close look at the elections results from Johnson County. That and the need to physically recuperate are why I've been taking this at my own pace.

Iowa was a national poster child for the dramatic swing away from the Democrats. But the Johnson County election returns looked like... normal Johnson County election returns.

Hillary Clinton slipped just 1.44% and 466 votes from Barack Obama's 2012 numbers. Donald Trump, meanwhile, fell 3.8% and 2654 votes off Mitt Romney's pace. This left Hillary with a bigger raw vote margin over The Donald than Barack had over The Mitt.

I said all along that Trump would have trouble topping 25% here, and his 27.35 was just barely above George HW's worst-ever for a major party nominee 27.12% in 1992.

That, of course, was a true three-way race with Ross Perot taking one in six votes here. This year the third parties got 7.4% but it scattered among the eight other options on the ballot... and some who were not.

Gary Johnson soaked up 3.6% of the total vote. Close to a third of that is the regular Libertarian vote (1.1% in 2012). My gut check is that more of the remainder came out of Trump than Clinton, if only because the Republican numbers dropped more and because of my unsubstantiated rule of thumb that Libertarians pull two GOP votes to one Democratic vote.

Jill Stein bumped up from 0.4 to 1.1, but that's way below the Green's best with Ralph Nader's 6% from 2000. Also compare Clinton's 65% to Al Gore's 61.

The Legal Marijuana Now Dude got about one vote a precinct. And if Gloria LaRiva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation stays on track, she should be POTUS by the 5016 election. Four votes in 2008, 10 in 2012, 35 this year. (Hey, I interviewed her, I get to make fun of the numbers.)

But the standout stats in the Also Ran numbers are the write ins. As recently as 2004, only 60 voters used the presidential write in line. That jumped to the 300 range in 2008 and 2012, largely thanks to Ron Paul and to a lesser extent the 2008 Hillary PUMAs. This year, the write ins tripled to 964, topping the 1 percent mark. Also notable: 536 people simply left president blank.

I don't want to take the time and I don't want to encourage it so I'm not diving into how many of those were Bernie or Bust and How many of those were Never Trump (Evan McMullin was just under 1%).

Remember that 14 percent stat from 2014? Make that a rule. Once again we are the most Democratic county in the statewide races by a very consistent margin: 14.7% better than Story for Hillary, and 13.7 better than Story for Patty Judge.

And, as for Roxanne Conlin in 2010 and Jack Hatch in 2014, the only win.

Dave Loebsack ran "only" 9.5 percent better here than in his next best county, thanks to a strong Jefferson County result. And Loebsack led the local ticket, with some 400 votes more than
Clinton. Roughly 8000 voters cast a Clinton-Grassley-Loebsack ballot. The "Fluke" congressman has now been in DC longer than Iowa Democratic legends Dave Nagle, Berkeley Bedell, Dick Clark, or Harold Hughes.

At the precinct level, we see the same rural-urban split in Johnson County that we see in the nation. Iowa City proper was a 72-20 Hillary blowout. It should not surprise you but Clinton's lowest percentages were in the pure student precincts, with just a 59-33% at Iowa City 3 (west side dorms) and mid-60s in other student precincts. (Iowa City: where mid-60s is a weak D precinct.)

That's not write ins and not third party votes (Gary Johnson was at a consistent 2 to 5 % across the county). The simple fact that people always forget about college towns is that it is NOT the undergrad stude3nt vote that makes them liberal. A lot of those undergrads are from small Iowa towns or outer Chicago suburbs and still to some extent follow parental lads. No, what makes college towns liberal is grad students and faculty and staff.

Which is why Clinton's best numbers were in that next layer out from downtown, the near east side, topping out at 82-11 in precinct 18 (Longfellow) and 80-13 at precinct 17 (the former City High precinct). In Johnson County, even the `burbs are better than anywhere else in the state for Dems: 68-25% in Coralville and 59-32% in North Liberty.Please don't tell Bob and Sue Dvorsky or Amy Nielsen I called Coralville and North Liberty `burbs.

Speaking of Nielsen, even holding a good legislative seat in a year this awful is an achievement. Any's 58-42 win over Royce Phillips closely mirror's Sally Stutsman's 60-40 win when this seat was open and new in the much better climate of 2012. Phillips generally did better the more rural the precinct, but also carried the Jeffersons (Airplane and Starship, better known as West and East or Shueyville and Swisher).

Donald Trump also won the Jeffersons and seven other precincts outside the urban part of the county, mainly from among the pure farm precincts but also including Oxford.

There really wasn't much more to see locally. We were bystanders in the battle for State Senate control. Bragging rights in the uncontested races go to Sheriff Lonny Pulkrabek over Auditor Travis Weipert and to Supervisor Lisa Green-Douglass (in her third win of the year) over Rod Sullivan and Kurt Friese. Sullivan, though, gets to keep bragging rights as the first voter in the election.

The county still casts 31.5% of its vote on straight tickets and
Democrats had more than a 10,000 vote advantage on that alone - one of
the reasons Republicans have such a hard time in general elections for
local office, and one of the reasons the New GOP Trifecta may eliminate
the option.

The Iowa City Referendum Referendum won the early vote handily and the election day vote barely, for a 58-42 win largely along traditional Iowa City progressive vs. townie lines.

That early vs. Election Day split was as usual consistent across races. When the absentee numbers went up at 9:00 on Election Night, way back in another lifetime when there was hope, Hillary had a 76-19% lean, which slipped through the evening because of the smaller 53-37% Election Day total.

Johnson County set its fifth consecutive presidential turnout record this cycle. The last time it dropped was from 1992 to 1996, which I blame on me being on the `96 ballot. The final (canvass was today) count stands at 77,476, up from 76,199 in 2012.

That wasn't as big a jump as my projection of 83,000 voters. And yet we were still rushing ballots out to polling places on Election Day. For the first time since early voting got serious in Iowa in 1992, the percentage of votes cast before Election Day edged down, from 58% in 2012 to 53%. The raw number of early votes slipped a little, too, while Election Day voting was up by about 4,000.

Some of that may be late decisions. Others, I heard second hand, were saying "I want to see the ballot go in the machine," as the shadow of a heavy ballot challenging effort in 2004 still looms long.

Within the early vote, there was a shift toward voting at the auditor's office, and away from satellite sites and mailed ballots. Some of this was strategy, as Democrats made their vote by mail efforts later after learning the hard way in past cycles that requests gathered at the door in June are garbage. (Winder how those requests forms from Caucus Night performed. I don't know, I took the requests out of the Johnson County caucus packets.)

The Johnson County satellite schedule was less extensive this cycle. Though we got the IMU back for the first presidential election post-2008 flood, we lost two of the best performing dorms, Burge and Hillcrest Halls, to increased handicapped accessibility standards. And I'm still mad at Hy-Vee for turning us down. Lucky's was more hospitable, and had an AC/DC pinball machine in the voting area, but only drew 240 voters compared to the 400+ we used to get at 1st Avenue Hy-Vee.

Some of the shift was the voter's choice to come to the office rather than try parking downtown at the public library. We had a smooth operation and were regularly processing over 500 voters a day, peaking at 1800 the day before the election. More people voted at the office in 2016 than in 2008 and 2012 combined.

It may be a good thing that people got used to coming to the office. I expect satellite voting to be banned soon after the legislature convenes, and for the early voting window to get shorter. (Office voting and mail will survive, because Republicans like and use those methods.) With no satellites and, say, two weeks of voting instead of six, 1800 voters in a day will feel like a picnic.

Still, better than no options at all. We're still working on the election day registrations, but through 6 PM at least 2653 voters had used that option. I'm at the point where I just want the session to get here and the hammer to fall so I'll know what the rules will be and can start adapting to the New Order.

"The central problem that we grappled with last fall is the gap that separates the Head Culture from activist politics. Somewhere in the nightmare of failure that gripped America between 1965 and 1970, the old Berkeley-born notion of beating The System by fighting it gave way to a sort of numb conviction that it made more sense in the long run to Flee, or even to simply hide, than to fight the bastards on anything even vaguely resembling their own terms....

Most of us are living here because we like the idea of being able to walk out our front doors and smile at what we see. The world is full of places where a man can run wild on drugs and loud music and firepower -- but not for long. I lived a block above Haight Street for two years but by the end of '66 the whole neighborhood had become a cop-magnet and a bad sideshow. Between the narcs and the psychedelic hustlers, there was not much room to live...

What happened in the Haight echoed earlier scenes in North Beach and the Village. . . and it proved, once again, the basic futility of seizing turf you can't control."

Hunter Thompson, The Battle Of Aspen: Freak Power In The Rockies, 1970

Strip away the 60s-specific references and that's where the People's Republic of Johnson County finds itself now.

While we remain a Democratic bulwark, we have failed to persuade our neighbors - literally, as we made great efforts to assist Muscatine-based Senator Chris Brase, one of the many swept out Tuesday. I could post that map again, like I did for Roxanne Conlin and Jack Hatch, showing us as the only county for Patty Judge, but that would feel like Don't Blame Me Told Ya So bragging. (And we have enough of that from some folks, and you know who you are, at the moment. Too soon.)

The last couple years have seen great progressive gains in Johnson County. But our purely local gains, most notably our minimum wage but also our Community IDs and our jail alternatives and our ease of voting and our no gun zones and maybe most critically our already strained mental health system, are now at the mercy (ironic word, that) of the Lock Them Up, Send Them Back, Papers Please state and national government.
Perhaps it's a littler better on a personal level - not safe, but
maybe in less danger - to be brown or out or different in a community
with our values. But let's not kid ourselves. We're not an inherently Better or More Progressive place than anywhere else.

We're a self-interested place.

What makes academic communities like Iowa City and Madison and
Berkeley and Ann Arbor liberal enclaves is NOT the mass of undergrad
students. Most of them come from those small towns or outer suburbs that voted for Trump, and they often follow the lead of their parents. They're also more likely to be going through their Atlas Shrugged phase and go on a third
party tangent. Which is why Hillary Clinton's numbers are slightly
lower (in the 60%s rather than 70s and 80s) in the core Iowa City student precincts than they were in the rest of urban Johnson County, by 8 or 10 points

No, what
makes academic communities, especially public university towns, is the
faculty and staff. We've seen the correlation of higher education levels
and lower trump percentages. But Another facet to that is that
Republican tax and spending cut rhetoric doesn't work when the highest
paid people in your community are paid with tax dollars. Your spending
cut comes out of my lab.

And in a revolt that had anti-intellectualism and anti-elitism as some of its roots, the public university that fuels our local economy is at the mercy of a Board of Regents full of political minions (a lesson we should have all learned with the appointment of Bruce Harreld) and a governor and legislature that do not share our values, that do not see us as a resource to the whole state but rather as a tax drain on the 96 counties in Iowa which don't have a Regents university.

Just because YOU don't know anyone who voter for Trump (or, more likely, who admitted to it) doesn't mean they weren't a majority in Iowa. We are living in turf we can't control, and it's payback time.

Wednesday, November 09, 2016

I'm still transitioning from the professional to the political on this night after the election, so I'm not yet capable to dig into the deep meaning of the election. So I'll stay in the professional zone and go over what the Republican takeover of the Iowa Senate, and thus the whole state government, will do to election law and process in Iowa.

Photo ID is of course a given. It's dogma to the party base, it's explained with simplistic arguments ("I have to show an ID to do X, Y and Z...") and opposed only with complex meta-arguments about disproportionally. And mostly because that very disproportionally makes it so effective in its true intent: keeping Undesirables from voting. In most states this would mean ethnic minorities, but in Iowa it also means young mobile people in particular students. The only question is how strict the law will be.

Next on the chopping block is satellite voting. Folks in campus counties and bigger cities, like the only six counties that Hillary carried last night, like the convenience of voting at their campus or a library or a hospital. People are more likely to vote where they spend their lives,
so campus sites are crucial to the student vote. The small counties with scattered small towns don't have the critical mass of population or the high-traffic locations to justify the sites, and they simply don't work. (Wal-Mart refuses at the corporate level to host early voting sites. I've tried.)

Of all the voting options available to Iowans, satellite voting produces the strongest Democratic percentages. Margins of 8 to 10 Democrats to one Republican are pretty common at the Iowa City Public Library. And since urban Democrats like satellite voting and rural Republicans don't use it, satellite voting is dead.

Satellite voting is "oh, I can vote here today?" while voting at the auditor's office is more like, "I'm going to be out of town Tuesday so I need to vote." Which is why voting at your auditor's office will likely survive.

Older people and Lifelong Residents (Iowa City voters know that code term) are much more likely to know where the courthouse is, what the hours are, and are more likely to plan ahead. Even in Johnson County, in elections other than general elections, the office vote leans older and more conservative that the average of the electorate. I've called many local elections wrong because I spend all day waiting on old Republicans crossing over for a primary and asking "how soon can I change back."

Office voting is likely to change, though, probably with far fewer days than the long-standing 40 day voting window for primary and general elections.

Voting by mail will also survive, because it's the method Republicans are most likely to use. Mass mailings of absentee requests (which Democrats do too) net a lot of GOP seniors.

The restrictions here are instead likely to focus on how requests can be made and how ballots are returned, under the cynical rationale of "ballot security." “I believe no one should be touching your absentee ballot except you, an
authorized election official or a postal worker,” Secretary of State Paul Pate has said. So door knocking for absentee requests could be curtailed, and ballot chasing could be restricted or eliminated - and it's Democrats who do those things.

On-line voter registration may also survive, in part because that welcome innovation was Pate's baby and in part because it requires that Iowa driver's license which newcomers and out of state students don't have.

Election day registration was one of the first things the Democratic trifecta did in 2007. The question is whether it's popular enough with the public to survive. My gut feeling is not, or that it will be changed Wisconsin-style to something so narrow as to be almost unusable (like the cannabis oil law). More likely the pre-registration deadline will be pushed back to 20 or 30 days.

Clean redistricting is probably too deeply embedded in the Iowa political culture to come under attack. It's also not a "necessary" change because the GOP is doing just fine with the law as is. And meddling with it would probably prove unpopular with independents.

I wouldn't be surprised to see an earlier poll closing time discussed. Iowa closes at a relatively late 9 PM for primary and general elections. Republicans and sadly some Democrats have supported rolling that back to 8, which is the closing time for local elections. But Democratic legislators have always stopped it. My own look at the numbers shows that the 8 to 9 hour gets about as many voters as any other part of the day.

Finally, one change is happening without legislative action. Gary Johnson topped the 2 percent bar in Iowa, which gives the Libertarian Party their long sought goal of full party status. The main difference from the "political organization" status they currently share with the Greens is that there will now be a Libertarian primary in 2018. The signature levels for a just barely big enough to qualify party to get its candidates on the ballot in Iowa are minuscule, and primary turnout is likely to be just as minuscule. My county had 44 voters in the last third party primary, for the Greens in 2002. The practical effect is a lot more printing costs and testing time for auditors, for ballots few people will use.

Sunday, November 06, 2016

Election eve - and with the absentee ballot board coming in early tomorrow, it's my election eve - is a strange time for me. I live in the world of politics and elections all the time. It's normally a small and insular world.

But once every four years - NOT in mid-terms, which we need to work on! - once every four years it's everyone's world. And I get to see the beautiful diversity of my many layered community coming through my office. Wave after wave, layer after layer, communities within my community that I barely oven notice existing at other times.

It's enlightening and uplifting and it's helped make up for the fearful climate of this year.

This is my fifth presidential cycle at my job. (The cycle before that I was a candidate and the one before that I was a staffer.) I've averaged 70 hour weeks the last two, and I'm two weeks past my last day off.

I made a brief stop at the headquarters after work. The office was filled, with people I don't know and who don't know who I am. It's ironic - as deeply embedded in the political community as I am, yet at the very moment the process peaks, I'm an outsider. Or, rather, I'm so deep inside that I can't see anything except this handful of bad absentee ballots that I'm desperately trying to get voters to fix.

Sometime in the week since I last drove the car, my sons figured out how to work the satellite radio, and in my brief drive I found the 80s college radio station. It was playing "Rise" by Public Image Limited, and Johnny Rotten Lyden was howling over and over:

Anger is an energy... anger is an energy... anger is an energy... anger is an energy...

When I was 22 and playing that then-new song on college radio, my anger was aimed straight at Ronald Reagan who I was convinced would draft and kill me, and that anger WAS an energy.

But at age 52, and in the context of this election, it scared the crap out of me.

I parked in the driveway and tried to figure out what it meant. If you're looking for hope, don't turn to Johnny Rotten. Was close to tears until my wife startled me, and teased me for playing it so loud loud enough to hear in the house. Loud enough that even the teenage kids were complaining and how's that for role reversal.

Our state has been the definitive counter-trend state of this election, and that poll last night was troubling.

But I'll tell you something else. There's something I've seen more this election from voters - by that I mean not generic voters but actual people coming into my office to vote right now - something I've seen more this year than any other election.

Passports.

Passports that are obviously very new.

As if to prove beyond any doubt and any accusation that they whatever the color of their skin, they are real Americans.

At one point I helped someone who is well known in the community register for the first time. A name you would know. I was unaware they had not been a citizen until just days before. And I get the feeling that many others hustled along on the naturalization process to make sure not to miss this election.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

I'm so deep in the bubble that I have no idea what's really happening in this election.

Oh, I have a front row seat, sort of. But my change in job title this year means that I'm doing a lot less of some stuff that I used to do - taking routine calls and waiting on routine voters - that gave me a constant opportunity to take the public pulse and temperature.

Now I'm only dealing with the extra complicated problems, and that's not a reliable enough sample set to make any judgments. It's also a bit draining, and after getting home and catching up on the day's events I have no energy left for writing (I'm really forcing this right now and I'm sure it shows.)

My only bit of wisdom: If you want a sense of how Johnson County will turn out, watch the turnout at next week's Iowa Memorial Union satellite sites (all week). That's when we'll find out what's happening with our biggest variable, young voters. The Iowa outcome is still in doubt and as I've said before, history will judge this election by the Hillary over Trump margin, and the third party, write in, and non votes don't contribute to that margin.

I'm definitely too busy to be doing any voter fraud.

Elections are once again an election issue. I'm also too busy to write much about it but I will share some good background. Let's start with my boss.

"If you look at all the facts, it has been almost proven that any voter fraud has been proven non-existent in Iowa," Weipert said Tuesday morning. "I don't understand why the candidates and campaigns are going after us...Let us run the elections, that's why we are elected."

Even without all the checks and balances, it would be really really hard to steal an election. The best piece I've seen on that comes from GOP election law attorney Chris Ashby. Read the whole thing but I'll break down the summary paragraph.

To rig an election, you would need (1) technological capabilities that exist only in Mission Impossible movies, plus (2) the cooperation of the Republicans and Democrats who are serving as the polling place’s election officials, plus (3) the blind eyes of the partisan pollwatchers who are standing over their shoulders, plus (4) the cooperation of another set of Republicans and Democrats — the officials at the post-elections canvass, plus (5) the blind eyes of the canvass watchers, too. Then you’d still have to jedi-mind trick lawyers, political operatives and state election administrators, all of whom scrub precinct-level returns for aberrant election results, and scrutinize any polling place result that is not in line with what they would have expected, based on current political dynamics and historical election results.

Point 2: In Iowa poll workers have to be very closely balanced by party - an ongoing challenge in a 2 to 1 Democratic county, but we manage (with a lot of help from the Republicans).

#5 is most interesting to me. You'd have to know exactly where to steal, exactly how much to steal, how much to steal and exactly how much you could get away with stealing, on a statewide or nation wide scale.

If degenerate gambler Hunter Thompson were still alive he could paint the analogy: a massive point shaving scheme.

Only you have to pull it off not just in one game but across an entire Saturday college football schedule, and you'd have to beat the odds in over half the games. You'd have to know every player on every team to spot the ones with ethical weaknesses or miscellaneous vulnerability to threats. They'd have to by random chance be placed on exactly the right teams and in exactly the right positions. Leaving the analogy and going back to the point for a moment, Philip Bump in the Washington Post:

You can't predict which state will be key. If you're going to rig the vote, you need to do it in a number of places at once -- which increases the risk, complexity and number of people involved. Adding a thousand votes in Florida would have made the difference, but that's only because George W. Bush won enough votes in other states to get him close to 270. You need to be able to predict the results in every swing state, or you need to rig votes across a broad geography. That's far harder than it seems at first blush.

Back to the analogy, the mistakes would have to be small enough to escape attention. You could get away with ONE missed field goal, but not four, especially if the kicker has been flawless all season.

And you'd go in knowing that there would be a near certainty of the player being caught. So you'd have to offer considerations big enough to get them to keep their mouths shut through long jail terms and permanent unemployability.

Saturday, October 15, 2016

The Johnson County Democrats are having their annual barbecue Sunday from 4 to 7 at the Johnson County Fairgrounds. I came close to abandoning one of the BBQs recent traditions: the auction of an official Deeth Blog Raspberry Beret as part of the silent auction.

It's been a tough year for the beret. It's coasting on past writing glory rather than current output, as life is giving me less time to write this year. Worse, of course, is the untimely loss of The Artist himself (though that DID put the song back on the charts for a week).

But when I learned that our guest speaker was a Minnesotan, Senator Amy Klobuchar, I knew I would have to pay Prince an appropriate tribute. That will take more than just the beret. To REALLY honor Prince, you need the music.

Included with the beret is a suitably framed original vinyl copy of Around The World In A Day, Prince's 1985 album that featured "Raspberry Beret" as the first single.

Also included: The Around The World In A Day sheet music book.

The barbecue runs from 4 to 7 Sunday. Klobuchar is scheduled to speak early. If she wants to honor her fellow Minnesotan with a big bid, you'll have time after to outbid her.

I'll take advance bids starting at $75 (this IS a fund raiser, and I put a few bucks into this, though of course the beret was the cheapest part) through any means of communication. As for the BBQ itself, tix are $25 each, $40 for family.